It's already a month old, but I just stumbled over this ITtoolbox Interview with Jonathan Cheyer (Open Source Community Manager) and Murat Demiroglu (Senior Product Manager) from Solid Information Technology, in which Dru Lavigne talks with them about Solid (the company) and the solidDB for MySQL storage engine, which is currently in beta testing. I still remember Solid from my times at SUSE Linux, where it used to be a part of the Linux distribution along with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Adabas D and several other DBs...

Just stumbled over this article, which might come in handy for our Microsoft Office users out there: "Using Excel to analyze MySQL data" by Jason Gilmore explains how to set up the MySQL Connector/ODBC and connecting to a MySQL database using Microsoft Excel.

If you're a Linux user, this article on NewsForge covers a similar topic, using OpenOffice.org

to connect to a MySQL Server.

Update: Thanks to Guillermo Roditi for pointing out that both links pointed to the same article - now fixed. Sorry about that.

Last week I was notified that my article about how to install and configure MySQL and the MySQL Connector/J was published in the Java Starter Magazine, a special edition of the german Java Magazin. It covers the basic installation of MySQL and Connector/J on Windows and Linux and how to write a small example program to connect to to MySQL with Java using the Eclipse framework. They were kind enough to send me a number of copies that I plan to give away at tonight's Hamburg MySQL User Group Meeting.

Paul McCullagh works on a new pluggable transactional Storage Engine for MySQL, called PrimeBase XT. I met him for an interview a few days ago - you can now read it on the MySQL Developer Zone. Enjoy and have a nice weekend!

It's seems that Mac OS X has become the OS of choice for many people that wanted to get away from Windows or got too frustrated with Linux on the desktop. MySQL has been ported to OS X a long time ago and is even shipped as a component of OS X Server. The Apple Developer Connection now has a nice article about using and developing MySQL on OS X, including many quotes from Brian Aker.